The first measurements of acoustic peaks in the CMB anisotropies have confirmed that the birth of fluctuations may have taken place during an early inflationary era of the universe. In this domain, our activities deal with the construction of explicit models of inflation as well as the extraction of their observable consequences. Our fields of expertise comprise some actively debated subjects as the trans-Planckian problem, inflation with non-minimally coupled scalar fields, DBI- and brane inflation as in the context of String Theory (KKLMMT models). For all these systems, we are maintaining various numerical tools to compute the relevant observables required for comparison with CMB data. Special attention is devoted to the class of multi-field inflationary models. The hybrid mechanism is expected to be realized within high energy particle physics models whereas Higgs inflation is a candidate of choice for TeV scale inflation.
External collaborators: Jérôme Martin (Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, France), Sébastien Clesse (Cambridge University, U.K.).
The forthcoming cosmological experiments should provide new insights on the amount of non-Gaussianity eventually present in the Cosmic Microwave Background fluctuations and large scale structures surveys. We study various early universe models that could potentially let some imprints in these observables and especially cosmic strings.
External collaborators: Teruaki Suyama (The University of Tokyo, Japan), Mark Hindmarsh (Sussex University, U.K.), Stéphane Colombi, François Bouchet (Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, France).
